As part of our Lost in Time series, we present you with an Artist Spotlight on Andrew Wetmore. Andrew Wetmore is a poet and musician located in Anaheim, California. His work has appeared in City Brink, Pink Attic Review, and Vagabond City. Below you’ll find two of Andrew’s poems, very different in subject, but with similar detached yet anxious tones.

I am a crude balloon.
A misshapen montage of this jokecalledlife
I float like a ghost passing through red wine
I float like mist passing over red ice
—insert punchline.

Come to my city and Iʼll show you a time
and let you taste the flesh
of the milkandhoney crime
while we watch the sapdrip from the prophetic minds
of 1000 halfpoets
with sties in their eyes.

But I can see the sun in the mirroredglass shine
the wood water tower and the steam from the street heat
the traffic jam shower and the carts of halal meat

the coalcolored nanny with white money in the pram
the new rich bluebloods with their daddies on the lam
the Babushka screeching with her headphones on
the slow roll of stoners on the Central Park lawn

the voodoo birdman with his featherfilled crown
the brown rainwater from the gutter to the ground
the 3 a.m. ferry filled with Staten Island stain
the flophead magician in the Bronx on the train

the crackhead peeling apple skin with her teeth
the 5 finger discount of the mallrat thief
the blond Brooklyn boys with their skintight jeans
the bold black beauties braiding hair up in Queens

the clearcut edges of Manhattan glass and stone
the slick city style of the uptown drone
the day old vomit and the rookie on the beat

and all my lost hours
passing through my feet.

This has been “Eight” by Amber Nigro, part of our Lost in Time series.

Amber Nigro lives on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, where she makes art stuff with pictures, words, and sounds. She earned her BA in Creative Writing from Hunter College and an MLS from Pratt Institute. She believes that the aesthetic term “Gesamtkunstwerk” can be applied to everyday life.

I am Jacob. Jacob Ellis. I went to the place where the urban meets the rural and walked down sandy pathways to see ponds. The dusk was going to announce itself there. I had been trying to escape the day because the day had been a lurid artifact- too bright, too angled, and in point of fact, too new. I just needed to see the tree lines where the difficult storms had grown vexatious taken the leaves and branches ragged across tornado –like skies fluttering like a bat can seem to flutter. At the bottom of summits I watched the rocks grand and small. There was a great stillness, a preternatural quietude and so I, in turn, to honor such a natural silence, remained quiet. It wasn’t difficult as I was alone. I had the queer idea that some metaphysical presence might make itself known. Not a deva or sprite, no, nothing like that. And not a guardian angel or whispered message from the large Bur Oaks, Pines, or feral shrubs. Then what? To tell the truth, I did not and do not know. I just thought something might happen there. It did and it did not. I didn’t hear or see anything, and cannot tell a lie. But there was something in the silence. Maybe it is something they speak about in the perennial philosophy, if the perennial philosophy speaks anywhere of a silence that seems to shout the divine. It was. It was. It was. It was a grace that rang out from the quiet dusk pond by the crescive and verdant meandering path walls, from the thunder miles and miles away that did lightly erupt into the air across pregnant and warning cumulus, and from the dense thicket making a perimeter around the outside of the back of the water that sat still and stoically as a rooftop for the water spiders. I was grateful. I had not seen God A Person or a burning bush, but I had received through the agency of nature some calmness. That is how I felt after hearing the sum of the sound of the forest and water. Afterwards, it started to rain. I had to use my high beams or ‘Brights’ as some people used to call them. I noticed that the rain disturbs the frogs and they begin to come out to the roads, the one-lane highways I had to traverse. I tried to maneuver around them so as not to hurt even one. Difficult. I managed well enough. I was glad, even a bit heart-swept to arrive home. I am Jacob. Jacob Ellis.

This has been “LISTENING TO THE DIVINE SHOUT BEFORE DRIVING AROUND THE FROGS THAT LEAVE THE LOAM” by Brian Michael Barbeito, a part of our Lost in Time series.

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer and poet. The author of Chalk Lines, a collection of short fictions (Fowl Pox Press, 2013: cover art and design by Virgil Kay), he is also an amateur photographer of rural landscapes. See more from Brian on his Twitter.

Selma. Soweto. Stalingrad. Hallowed ground, places where, in the last seventy years, the forces of humanity managed to conquer the lesser beasts of our nature, bringing us one tiny step closer to the utopia that was promised in Paris, by Marx, so many years ago.

Trayvon. Matthew Shepherd. Michael Brown. Young men slaughtered, either by a police state, or by the same savages that would deny most the basic tenants of happiness, simply because they couldn’t see past their own darkened, fears, and past the fallacies of their own arguments.

Being a Marxist that grew up in the South, I’ve seen the ravages, on both sides, which seem to defy the logic of our existence. After all, how can a species that propagates as well as ours seem so hell-bent on its own destruction? On the flip side, how can the Southeast, marred with the scars of Jim Crow and slavery, play host to some of the most charitable, most hospitable people on the planet?

Sometimes I find myself trying not to sleep while I’m biting down on my own teeth realizing I just need to think and breathe. Counting sheep doesn’t work but the thought of counting does.

During times like these I form into a shapeless mass like what happens when water and street oil meet. And although there isn’t much to hold there seeps a feeling deep beneath the thick comforter that is my psyche and waits for sleep as it lingers on to all the colors and shading. There is where I reflect universally. Continue reading →

Walking proved itself a burden. Each step moved me slowly towards the darker center of the forest. I understood it was Time’s forest where no sunlight of redemption could fall. I had expected wolves,bears, and creatures of deep bites to follow me in. I had run through the tunnel of light promised to take me to clean death only to find the forest ahead. I had wanted death, not terror. I had wanted to find the ending, not the continuation.

My heart betrayed me with its loud beat. Even the trees were leaning in to hear its call. Even the comet stopped in the heavens overhead.

When he turned, unfolding out of a tree trunk, I stood still. Finally.

He asked me where I came from and why. I countered with the same. He smiled. He invited me into the tree.

“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “I want to go on.”

“Only Time goes on,” he answered.

“Then I want to go back,” I sighed.

“No back. Time goes straight through the tunnel of light, through the woods, through the hole in the universe, and starts again. You can hide in the tree. Time won’t find you there.”

“I found you there,” I laughed, suddenly running with the beats of my heart deeper and deeper until the big mouth at the end swallowed even my concept of flight.

This has been “Dark Wood” by Christine Emmert, the fourth piece in our “Lost In Time” Sleepless Stories series.

Christine Emmert is a writer, actress , director and educator. She lives at the edge of her own dark wood in Pennsylvania with her husband Richard and her amazing dog, Raja. Performing throughout the eastern half of USA her plays, poetry and prose writings have been seen throughout the English speaking world. Presently THE NUN’S DRAGON (a novella) is out on Amazon Kindle and her blog can be accessed at christineemmert.wordpress.com.